Some money was transferred to me through Venmo, but after a week I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t in my bank account. The Venmo said it was paid, but I wasn’t getting it. Went to the bank and they were as mystified as I was.

Yesterday I opened the Ap and started fiddling with it, and I noticed that I had the money in my account ready to go, but I needed to push the Transfer button. BAM! Now my account was empty and I was notified that the money had been transferred.

That is always the case, isn’t it. We have all the power we need, but we have to activate it. Our manual for life never has instructions on how to activate out power. We always have to fiddle with it. So that is the fine print instruction in the manual. When all else fails, fiddle with it.

Then we come upon the trigger that releases the lock. And we are always surprised that it was there all the time, on the other side of our assumptions.

The Revelation for me is that the world is not a hostile place. We are not aliens in our own home. That is an assumption. Who knows where I got it, but primarily we get it from the get go when we are born into this culture where like a fish we are shaped by the bowl we swim in. How does the fish get out of the bowl. It can’t.

However, culture is like a bowl of glass in floating in an ocean. The fish can’t get to the ocean. It knows the ocean is there, but swims along the wall of glass, feeling the contraction but not knowing why, so it blames things inside the bowl for the pain of the bowl.

The only way out of the bowl is to discover that there is no bowl. The bowl is the shape of our mind, like the womb shaped the fetus. Seeing that the bowl really isn’t there is like being born into the greater real world. You suddenly feel no invisible walls and restrictions. You discover that the bowl of culture and the bowl of your Ego is the same bowl. You are FREE. You look back and you can’t even see the bowl you were once entombed in.

Culture itself creates the sense that I’m alone, in exile, an alien in a hostile meaningless world. Given that terror, I create sub-cultures of meaning in which I can swim, but this just creates a sub-bowl culture that bumps into other sub-culture bowls, and each fears the other will break its glass and destroy the last wall against chaos and not-being.

So how does one break through the glass wall of assumptions? What does fiddle with it mean? You fiddle with something, with box you can’t open or with an idea in order to see what you don’t know, but the fiddling cannot happen when you assume you know. When I’m confronted with a box I can’t open (box is a metaphor), my karma is to assume I can’t open so I defer to my wife who assumes she can open it. But that is in the physical world.

When it comes to Idea Boxes, I fiddle with them until they open to a new understanding. The closed box moves from closed to open. Culture opens to me and reveals a bright new expansive world that I could not see from inside the box of culture.

Fiddling with something means you are curious about it, and being curious about it means you have no personal investment in it. One can only fiddle with something is a state of Not Knowing. You fiddle with something in order to know it.

So if I want to know God…I’m going to have to fiddle with God from the place of Curiosity. My path began when I decided I was an agnostic or atheist, in college, agnostic I guess, because I then became totally curious, ultimately concerned curious, about God…I wanted to open this box, damn it.

So every way you investigate the box, that is not it..not this belief..not that…not this…not that..you keep fiddling. One day, when you least expect it, the box pops open—Culture pops open—is a big blast of Insight. WOW…and then the box closes up again. But you are encouraged. You fiddle some more.

Trump really believes that he is above the law so that gives him license to create the presidency as Performance Art. His rallies are like tent revivals designed to juice up his base by reaffirming their faith. They have faith in him because he is breaks the rule, plays outside the laws of decency. Trump is the Bad Boy. Some women like bad boys, their fatal attraction. The Bad Boy is an archtype for adventure, for going where no man has gone before. And the Bad Boy is going to take you on an adventure, and it is an adventure because it is risky. There is no adventure without risk, without danger.

Good boys are safe, bad boys make you feel alive. Good boys present a good public image, but good boys hide their bad boy from sight. But once in a while, the bad boy comes out.

America presents itself as a collective image as being a good boy, Christian, democratic, and always with good intentions. But others see our Bad Boy side. I find it telling that the moral Christians, the good Christians love this Bad Boy, because he gives their “bad boy” expression. By affirming their bad boy, they no longer feel that bad boy must stay in the closet of the unconscious. There is nothing more liberating for the Good Boy than being permitted to be bad.

Sailors know this for when they are in a foreign port, the good family sailor at home can become the bad sailor on a broad. It’s called Liberty.

So Trumps appeal is the intoxication of the good who can also be bad at the same time. No more internal conflict. I can be a good virgin and have sex at the same time.

KAV is a good boy who lets his Bad Boy out in the liberty of frat parties. But during the hearing, his bad boy leaked out.

When we look at the relationship between the members and the cult leader, the members take a feminine role and the leader the male role. The Bad Boy is a man who can do things for you and To You. Once you get on his motorcycle you can’t get off until the ride is over.

There are so many ways we look at Trump. Trump as an archetype of the Bad Boy is a new one, as far as I can see. An archetype, a C. Jung term, is a collective image that activates the unconscious forces of the unconscious where our true psychic energy lies. The Madonna with child is an archetype. Bernie Sanders as the wise old man is an archetype. Hillary as a controlling mother is an archetype. Monroe is an archetype of the eternal seductress. Reagan as the man on a horse from the west is an American archetype of the hero savior.

Archetypes in the collective unconscious are used by advertising (political and commercial) and movies to activate the energy of the mind into action. The archetype is as projection of our own psyche onto an external image, and we must possess that image in order to retrieve our own energy that has taken an eternal form. We love that image because that image is ourself.

I felt the call to watch it again recently, then I read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness….Where is that place at the headwaters of the river in my life. Where did Kurtz go? The book and movie is a metaphorical map that is both factual in that it takes place in space/time, but it also takes place in that intermediate zone where our known and unknown meet..at the headwaters of our own mind, the mysterious place where our river of life is created…what is the wisdom hidden there?

I was watching an Anthony Bourdain adventure to the headwaters in the Congo to visit a remote tribe, and they had a feast where as guest he had to kill the pig. Oh…the terror, the terror of life eating life to life. Is life death? Is death life? Are they the same? One or two?

Did our hero have to kill Kurtz to live? Was Kurtz the sacrificial animal? Kurtz was the fisher king in the Romance of the Grail; he had the wound that would not heal. When Percival won the grail and healed the Fisher King, he did not take on the wound of the king. He because the king without the ground. Did our hero in the movie take on the wound of Kurtz when he went back into society? Did he have a boon? Had he won enlightenment like Indiana Jones at the headwaters of his mind. What was the act that healed the wound?

Watching this clip I thought I was watching the Sky People slaughter the Navi in Avatar with their flying machines. The American inaction of Vietnam was an America Myth or Story of itself being superimposed over a jungle. The Triumph of American Will. What was real to the Americans was their Story or Myth (the Stench of Lies) not the destruction of human life. Reality was bent by the myth of the Story.

The same thing is happening today with Trump and the GOP. The Myth of the American Savior Party, the Triumph of Will, is being superimposed over the real ground of America, so in order that the Myth to be true, America must be destroyed like Vietnam. When your story is about the Triumph of the Will, a savior complex, there has to be an enemy to fight. This is the Don Quixote syndrome. The dragons are really just windmills. You own people become your enemy so you can save them.

This morning I see Apocalypse Now in a new light, the NOW light. Life is always a contest between our story of life and real life, between the unreal and the real. We fear the Apocalypse, we welcome the Apocalypse. The Apocalypse is ambiguous, two faces of the same coin. Life is death; death is life. Ambiguous isn’t it…and that’s the Terror…the Terror of Kurtz.

Ah…another insight. Our hero is assigned the duty of killing Kurtz. How does he do that. He is Arjuna in the Gita, a warrior who has doubt about his role because the cause or the war is ambiguous; you kill you family as well as your enemy. So Arjuna quits and seeks wisdom at the headwaters of his being, Krishna.

In the end our hero rises out of the river reborn. He now kills Kurtz cleanly, without doubt and confusion; he does his duty and returns to the madness with wisdom, whole and human.

Apocalypse Now has many metaphorical layers; it’s a Realization Feast. But you can only go as deep as you are ready for, a depth that you will accept. You only get the teacher (teaching) you deserve. If you cup is full, you can’ pour anything else in it. This movie is meant to empty your cup. Can you go to the Terror, the Terror in. your own well? Can you go the center of the labyrinth of you mind where the Minotaur lives? Can you kill the Minotaur, Capt. Kurtz? Can you get out of the labyrinth alive, or do you wander in the maize for the rest of your life, many more lives, perhaps? Can you kill your own Pain Body, Capt. Kurtz the Minotaur within? So many insights to discover in this movie that is a metaphor not only for our collective mind now, but you who are also Now.

What is the Protestant view of grace and how is the different from the Catholic. Today’s congressional hearing reenacts these two views. The FBI is the catholic view that grace flows through the office of the institution and a agent’s personal views do not effect his performance of his office. The Republican view is Protestant in that the bias of the office holder corrupts the power for the office. A flaw in character is a flaw in the office. Clinton got impeached on this view. However, Trump gets a free pass. Reality is as we want to perceive it.

We’re talking about the movie Hurt Locke tonight, the movie as metaphor. What is the Hurt Locker? This movie is disguised Buddhism because the Hurt locket is Duhkha of the suffering of life that is fragmented by choices, fragmented by divisions and complexity. Hurt Locker is about the simplicity of war because here there are no choices; just on or off, life or death. But do we have to go to war and deconstruct bombs in order to be free of the Hurt Locker?

I’ve spent the last few days throwing out my accumulated choices, all the past stuff I’ve saved and stored because there was only incoming and no outgoing in my office. So there was a bunch of clean-up energy that rises at the end of the year. Restoring order is the way we simplify our lives, Choices like cereal brands have a way of multiplying. We can’t get down to the simple on/off ground of life. When you get down to ON/OFF you have no choice but to be ON, to choose life. Life is not divided at this level. There is no Hurt at this level.

The Hurt comes from divisions of life into choices. When you have to choose, you create the Chooser. And the Chooser is a fictitious person, someone who chooses. When you get down to ON/OFF, there is no Chooser. There is no on separate from the choice because life cannot be divided into a choice. You are not making a choice, like a potter makes a pot, you are the choice.

And this takes us back to our discussion on Time. When you get down to the Hurt Locker, you are not a chooser in time making a choice in time (choice requires time), you ARE time. There is nothing outside of time. There is no you outside of Time to make a choice.

But, remember our previous talk when we looked at horizontal time and vertical time. Horizontal time is making a choice to catch a bus or not. In Vertical Time you are what you do. This is Primary Time, timeless time, while making a choice to catch a bus is secondary time. The Metaphor Hurt Locker contains these opposites and as metaphor generates energy through the tension of the opposites, energy you need to make the leap from horizontal time to vertical time…which is not a choice.

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Awaken Insight Meditation

AIM is a website where I share my Dharma Insights in my everyday mind. My daily experiences are metaphors that point to the Truth that is One. Paths are many, but the Dharma is One. I invite you to walk with me on my journey. I also invite you to enter into creative dialogue with the post, for then we push it forward and get some traction in our life.